6th Dec from Inside Cli­mate News:

Indus­try con­sul­tants said anti-tar sands push could become ‘the most sig­nif­i­cant envi­ron­men­tal cam­paign of the decade’ if activists were left unop­posed.

As envi­ron­men­tal­ists began ratch­et­ing up pres­sure against Canada’s tar sands three years ago, one of the world’s biggest strate­gic con­sult­ing firms was tapped to help the North Amer­i­can oil indus­try fig­ure out how to han­dle the mount­ing activism. The result­ing doc­u­ment, pub­lished online by Wik­iLeaks, offers anoth­er win­dow into how oil and gas com­pa­nies have been scram­bling to deal with unre­lent­ing oppo­si­tion to their growth plans.

The doc­u­ment iden­ti­fies near­ly two-dozen envi­ron­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions lead­ing the anti-oil sands move­ment and puts them into four cat­e­gories: rad­i­cals, ide­al­ists, real­ists and opportunists—with how-to’s for man­ag­ing each. It also reveals that the worst-case sce­nario pre­sent­ed to indus­try about the movement’s grow­ing influ­ence seems to have come to life.

The Decem­ber 2010 pre­sen­ta­tion by Strate­gic Fore­cast­ing, or Strat­for, a glob­al intel­li­gence firm based in Texas, most­ly advised oil sands com­pa­nies to ignore or lim­it reac­tion to the then-bur­geon­ing tar sands oppo­si­tion move­ment because “activists lack influ­ence in pol­i­tics.” But there was a buried warn­ing for indus­try under one sce­nario: Let­ting the move­ment grow unop­posed may bring about “the most sig­nif­i­cant envi­ron­men­tal cam­paign of the decade.”

“This worst-case sce­nario is exact­ly what has hap­pened,” part­ly because oppo­si­tion to tar sands devel­op­ment has expand­ed beyond non­prof­it groups to include indi­vid­ual activists con­cerned about cli­mate change, said Mark Floegel, a senior inves­ti­ga­tor for Green­peace. “The more peo­ple in Amer­i­ca see Super­storm Sandys or tor­na­does in Chica­go, the more they are wak­ing up and join­ing the fight.”

[View the doc­u­ments at Inside Cli­mate News]

Since the pre­sen­ta­tion was pre­pared, civ­il dis­obe­di­ence and protests against the tar sands have sprung up from coast to coast. The move­ment has helped delay Pres­i­dent Obama’s deci­sion on the Key­stone XL pipeline—designed to fun­nel Canada’s land­locked oil sands crude to refiner­ies on the Gulf Coast—and has held up anoth­er con­tentious pipeline in Cana­da, the North­ern Gate­way to the Pacif­ic Coast.

The Pow­er Point doc­u­ment, titled “Oil Sands Mar­ket Cam­paigns,” was recent­ly made pub­lic by Wik­iLeaks, part of a larg­er release of hacked files from Strat­for, whose clients include the Depart­ments of Home­land Secu­ri­ty and Defense, Lock­heed Mar­tin, Raytheon and the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute, the oil indus­try lob­by. It appears to have been cre­at­ed for Cal­gary-based petro­le­um giant Sun­cor Ener­gy, Canada’s largest oil sands pro­duc­er.

 

The com­pa­ny told Insid­e­Cli­mate News that it did not hire Strat­for and nev­er saw such a pre­sen­ta­tion. Sun­cor is men­tioned 11 times in the document’s 35 pages and all of Stratfor’s advice seems to be direct­ed at the ener­gy com­pa­ny. For exam­ple, one slide says, “Cam­paign ends quick­ly with a res­o­lu­tion along the lines Sun­cor had want­ed.” In sev­er­al emails released by Wik­iLeaks, Strat­for employ­ees dis­cuss a $14,890 pay­ment Sun­cor owes the com­pa­ny for two com­plet­ed projects, though no details were pro­vid­ed.

The pre­sen­ta­tion is the lat­est in a series of rev­e­la­tions that sug­gest ener­gy companies—which for most of their his­to­ry seemed unfazed by activists—have been look­ing for ways to dilute envi­ron­men­tal­ists’ grow­ing influ­ence.

Ear­li­er this year, Tran­sCana­da, the Cana­di­an ener­gy com­pa­ny behind the Key­stone XL, briefed Nebras­ka law enforce­ment author­i­ties on how to pros­e­cute demon­stra­tors protest­ing the 1,200-mile project. In 2011, Range Resources, an oil and gas com­pa­ny, alleged­ly hired com­bat vet­er­ans with expe­ri­ence in psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare to squash oppo­si­tion of nat­ur­al gas drilling.

“The Strat­for pre­sen­ta­tion isn’t a com­plete sur­prise,” said Scott Parkin, a senior cam­paign­er for the Rain­for­est Action Net­work and vol­un­teer orga­niz­er for Ris­ing Tide North Amer­i­ca, both grass­roots envi­ron­men­tal groups. “As oppo­si­tion has grown, coal, oil and gas com­pa­nies are all start­ing to put more mon­ey into responding—from sur­veil­lance to pro­tec­tion to pub­lic rela­tions.”

Who Was Targeted?

For each of Stratfor’s cat­e­gories of envi­ron­men­tal activist—radicals, ide­al­ists, real­ists and opportunists—the pre­sen­ta­tion explains how their cam­paigns are struc­tured and how the fos­sil fuel indus­try could deal with them.

Three grass­roots orga­ni­za­tions—Ris­ing Tide North Amer­i­ca, Oil Change Inter­na­tion­al and the Indige­nous Envi­ron­men­tal Net­work—were labeled rad­i­cals. Green­peace and the Rain­for­est Action Net­work were clas­si­fied as a cross between rad­i­cals and ide­al­ists. Sier­ra Club, the nation’s largest envi­ron­men­tal group, Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al and Com­mu­ni­ties for a Bet­ter Envi­ron­ment, among oth­ers, were labeled ide­al­ists. Sev­er­al main­stream envi­ron­men­tal groups, includ­ing the Nation­al Wildlife Fed­er­a­tion, World Wildlife Fund, Nat­ur­al Resources Defense Coun­cil and Ceres, a non­prof­it that orga­nizes busi­ness­es, investors and pub­lic inter­est groups, were called real­ists.

It then lays out tac­tics the groups would use to push for change. They include hold­ing demon­stra­tions out­side annu­al meet­ings and mar­ket­ing events, gen­er­at­ing fear of oil spills and oth­er envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters, tar­get­ing CEOs and their fam­i­lies, col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­er green groups, and split­ting the fos­sil fuel indus­try on the issue by prais­ing com­pa­nies work­ing with activists and pub­licly sham­ing those that aren’t.

The pre­sen­ta­tion says that while envi­ron­men­tal groups are pub­licly fight­ing to stop the expan­sion of the oil sands, their “real demand” is for fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies to adopt a “glob­al code of conduct”—a set of best prac­tices not required by law, but that take into con­sid­er­a­tion things like green­house gas reduc­tion poli­cies and human rights.

The Pow­er Point also describes all the ways fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies like Sun­cor could choose to react to green groups’ cam­paigns, such as lim­it­ing con­tact with the orga­ni­za­tions, inten­tion­al­ly delay­ing nego­ti­a­tions, devel­op­ing its own envi­ron­men­tal ini­tia­tives to over­shad­ow activists’ demands, or sim­ply not respond­ing. It pro­vides the pros and cons of each pub­lic rela­tions deci­sion, as well as the best- and worst-case out­comes for each.

For exam­ple, Strat­for said that choos­ing not to respond could be use­ful because in 2010, “activists are not stop­ping oil sands’ growth and they have no pow­er in Alber­ta or Ottawa. Chance of suc­cess with U.S. gov­ern­ment is slim.” The best out­come from a no-response strat­e­gy, accord­ing to the pre­sen­ta­tion, is that green “groups move to frac­tur­ing [nat­ur­al gas frack­ing] or some oth­er venue to press for the first major code of con­duct.”

Strat­for would not answer ques­tions about the pre­sen­ta­tion because it has a pol­i­cy not to com­ment on any of the Wik­iLeaks doc­u­ments.

Sev­er­al envi­ron­men­tal groups named in the Strat­for pre­sen­ta­tion said they weren’t sur­prised by the con­sult­ing firm’s assess­ment of their work, but were dis­ap­point­ed, espe­cial­ly by its assump­tion that all they want­ed was a code of con­duct.

“The envi­ron­men­tal com­mu­ni­ty has been very unit­ed in say­ing that we need to stop tar sands expan­sion and clean up the mess already made there,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, direc­tor of the Nat­ur­al Resources Defense Council’s inter­na­tion­al pro­gram. “That’s the only real path for­ward if we’re going to pro­tect not only the health of com­mu­ni­ties on the ground in the bore­al forests near the tar sands region, but also around the world from the impacts of cli­mate change. We’re not look­ing for a code of con­duct.”

For many, the leaked pre­sen­ta­tion pro­vid­ed proof that their work was hav­ing an impact, boost­ing their con­fi­dence to keep protest­ing.

“Know­ing that groups like Strat­for are tar­get­ing us, sur­vey­ing us, and also ana­lyz­ing us shows how pow­er­ful these move­ments have become,” said Parkin of the Rain­for­est Action Net­work and Ris­ing Tide North Amer­i­ca. “Obvi­ous­ly this wasn’t meant for pub­lic con­sump­tion, but this doesn’t intim­i­date us. If any­thing, it embold­ens us. It encour­ages us to push hard­er.”